Eleanor Everywhere

(See front cover)

In a front gallery of Washington's tacky old Smithsonian Institution stand the plasticine ghosts of 33 famed U. S. women. Once the hostesses of a nation, their attitudes are models of spectral graciousness. Sitting placidly in her painted rose silk, motherly Martha Washington has raised her head as though she has just recalled that another of George's huge hose is hanging by the fire and needs mending. Mary Todd Lincoln, who loved style as much as her homely husband detested it, enjoys an elegant moment of respite in her pansy velvet gown, serene in the knowledge that her exquisite little fan and parasol would be the envy of many a prairie lady back home in Illinois. Lucretia Garfield stands resolutely erect, prepared for tragedy. Edith Carow Roosevelt placidly reads her book. Only the faintest notes of discord jar the harmony among the ghostly ladies in the Smithsonian gallery. Pale Ellen Axson Wilson has joined Mmes Taft and Roosevelt in their glass case, while her successor, Edith Boiling Gait Wilson stands with Florence Kling Harding and Grace Goodhue Coolidge, whose short skirt and sorority pin would have mystified many in that quiet company.

Some day from a studio in the nearby National Museum Building will come another plaster figure to join the silent party. It will be a long-legged model probably dressed in Eleanor Blue and posed to suggest energy, cheer, simplicity. The face, which in the living original is dominated by a generous, tooth-filled mouth, receding chin and warm, humorous eyes, will be indistinguishable from the faces of all the other First Ladies. For Sculptor William H. Egberts of the Smithsonian avoids arguments with friends, relatives and the subjects themselves by giving all the Presidents' wives the face of Frances Pierce Connelly's bust of Cordelia, daughter of Lear. Her costume, contours and hairdress (a loose, high knot) will be preserved but completely lost will be the unrouged freshness, the amazing vitality of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt.

Until Eleanor Roosevelt came there, the White House's most energetic mistress had been Dolly Madison. She furnished the executive mansion with fine gilt chairs built in France, had the good sense to hide the Lansdowne portrait of Washington and fly to Virginia when the British invaded Washington. But when the British left, Dolly Madison came back home. As every reader of newspapers is by now aware. Franklin Roosevelt's Eleanor uses No. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. less as a home than as a base of operations. Mrs. Madison was limited to horses as her means of locomotion. Mrs. Roosevelt rides her horse Dot in Rock Creek Park for fun. To get herself places she has at her command airplanes, trains and a blue Buick convertible coupe. Since March 4 she has traveled incessantly up & down the nation, across it and back, visiting all manner of places and institutions. She has traversed its skies and its surface so thoroughly that, in epitomizing her ubiquity for the ages, the New Yorker pictured two coalminers at work in the earth's bowels (see cut, p. 12). One miner is saying: "For gosh sakes! Here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!"

Wife, mother, grandmother, schoolmarm, lecturer, editor, charitarian, social service worker, shopkeeper, clubwoman, colyumist, traveler--the nation had been given continuous demonstrations of Mrs. Roosevelt in all these capacities by this week when the time came for her to function formally as First Lady, at the opening of Washington's social season. U. S. women of all ranks and ages were waiting to see how she would perform as hostess of the White House. That Washington's fifth Depression winter would lack Taftian social glitter was to be expected. But busy Mrs. Roosevelt announced two innovations calculated to strip the season's social functions to the bare bone of practicality.

Calendar. The exhausting all-day public reception at New Year's will be discontinued, said she. Undoubted reason: to spare the President the ordeal. The number of guests at the five other receptions will be curtailed. Guests whose names are removed from those lists will be received after the five state dinners. First of these affairs occurs this week, when the President and his lady dine the Cabinet. After that the White House calendar is arranged thus:

Dec. 7--Diplomatic reception. Dec. 14--Supreme Court dinner. Jan. 4--Judicial reception. Jan. 11--Diplomatic Corps dinner. Jan. 18--Congressional reception. Jan: 25--Vice President's dinner. Feb. 1--Departmental reception. Feb. 6--Dinner for Speaker of the House. Feb. 8--Army & Navy reception.

Hooverizer. In 1917, when the Herbert Hoovers and the Roosevelts were good friends in Washington, Mr. Hoover's Food Administration made Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt's household (two adults, five children, ten servants) its model for large families. Mrs. Roosevelt, who turned over to her daughter when she married the account books she kept as a bride, has always been a shrewd Hooverizer. She believes in such sustaining but economical standbys as baked beans, meat loaf, prune pudding and oatmeal. Last spring she entertained Mrs. Vincent Astor and some other ladies with a White House luncheon of which the main course was a soup made of spinach, dandelion greens and bacon grease--a dish reputedly in great favor with Andrew Jackson. She asked her guests afterwards if they did not think such a meal sufficient for midday. Some of the ladies politely hinted that they did not. Beaming as brightly as ever, Mrs. Roosevelt replied that she was just experimenting and wanted to find out. Recent dinner guests at the executive mansion have reported frankfurters as the entree. "I should be most unhappy," says Eleanor Roosevelt, ''if I could not buy new books, but having beefsteak for dinner would mean nothing to me whatsoever!"

Orphaned at ten, Mrs. Roosevelt was left some $30,000. She is a partner in Manhattan's Todhunter school for girls. Profits go back into the business, which is operated by her boon companion, Marion Dickerman. With her other inseparable friend. Nancy Cook, a tousle headed. unfeminine. effective woman who often dresses mannishly and smokes cigarets in a holder at the side of her mouth. Mrs. Roosevelt operates Val-Kill shops, an enterprise which manufactures antique reproductions at Hyde Park. This is a non-profit concern. In the past five years Mrs. Roosevelt has picked up some $25,000 from endorsements, radio talks and writing. The Roosevelts maintain a summer place at Campobello. New Brunswick, another country place at Warm Springs, Ga., and their Manhattan town house. Hyde Park belongs to the President's mother, as does the Roosevelt fortune. The Franklin Roosevelts are not rich. It therefore behooves Mrs. Roosevelt to live in the White House within the $88,750 salary paid the President by the Government. To this end she has reduced the staff from 32 to 23.

Her friends credit Mrs. Roosevelt's austerity to her orphaned childhood. Her Grandmother Hall raised her at Tivoli, on the Hudson. Mrs. Roosevelt recalls that twice a day she was expected to walk up & down a road on the estate with a cane hooked under her arms behind her back. She was two and her sixth cousin Franklin was four when they first met. Franklin rode her on his back. Says she: "I was a solemn child without beauty and painfully shy and I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth."

Public Character. Born of a strain that feels perfectly comfortable in the public eye, and prepared for the White House spotlight by four years in Albany's executive mansion, Mrs. Roosevelt has let the Press in on her most private comings & goings to an unprecedented extent. Her prodigious publicity has had several effects: to pain people who think the First Lady should be her husband's wife, not a front-page solo character; to gladden people who think it is fine that the country has a woman at its head as vitally interested in almost as many public movements as her husband; to reveal Mrs. Roosevelt, either as publicity-glutton or genuine, warm-hearted woman, in hundreds of little acts of graciousness and trouble-taking-- visiting a sick White House correspondent at the hospital, taking for an automobile ride a state policeman hurt on duty, going to see her son's divorced wife and their baby (to whom she did not take a present because, "I don't believe in giving presents to babies who already have everything they want.")

Her impulsive bobbings in & out of the President's office may seem incorrigibly undignified to her husband, but they make good copy. From her Monday press conferences, which she innovated, comes many a little human interest yarn. Fortnight ago she started another of her countless crusades, this time against poisonous cosmetics. In the Department of Agriculture's "chamber of horrors" she had discovered two photographs of a horribly blinded victim of "Lash Lure." Showing them to the ladies of the Press, she pressed the pictures to her breast and exclaimed: "I cannot bear to look at them!"

After March 4, Mrs. Roosevelt dropped her cold cream radio hour, withdrew from the publishing house of Macfadden, for whom she had been editing Babies--Just Babies, and took a journalistic step-up with an advice-to-all-comers page for Crowell's Woman's Home Companion. Her ingratiating daughter Anna Dall, who has her mother's long legs and vivacity, remains available for advertising, since her broadcasting contract with Best & Co. expired. By no means as brilliant a White House daughter as "Princess"' Alice Roosevelt (Longworth), her second cousin, she and her children "Sistie" (Anna Eleanor) and "Buzzie" (Curtis Roosevelt) do warm and brighten the place tremendously in contrast to the Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover atmospheres. Since her estrangement from her stockbroking husband, Anna Dall remains in Washington, pours tea for her father's guests during her mother's frequent absences.

"Quite a Job." Last week was a typical one in the life of the fast-moving First Lady. Monday morning she arose shortly after 7. She "has never had a sick day in her life," at 49 continues her morning exercises. She had a swim with the President, breakfasted at 8, answered her mail which arrives by the basketful. After her press conference at 11, she presided at a small luncheon party. In the afternoon she received the Persian Minister & Wife, entertained women executives of the State and Treasury departments at tea. Dinner guests were Publisher & Mrs. Frank E. Gannett of Rochester, N. Y.

Tuesday she rode horseback in the morning, consulted with representatives of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration about establishing urban clubs for single unemployed women to correspond to the CCC's winter encampments. After lunch she received diplomatic wives whom she had not yet met: Mmes Simopoulos (Greece), May (Belgium). Sze (China), de Bianchi (Portugal). Later there were 175 assorted tea guests. At midnight she entrained for Manhattan.

At 10 the next morning she arrived at the Junior League's club house, initiated a course in current events which she will conduct for Todhunter School this winter. That afternoon she opened an exhibition of ValKill furniture at her town house. Later she met Col. Louis Howe, the President's gnome-like little handy man. and according to Washington report, picked out his winter wardrobe for him.

Thursday, after meeting her son James & wife as they got back from Europe, she flew to Baltimore. A White House car picked her up, sped her to Washington where at 4:30 she spoke to 350 women members of Washington's community chest drive. Singer Grace Moore was the White House tea guest.

Friday morning she flew to Richmond, Va. to address a child welfare conference, attended a children's concert, visited a day nursery. She flew back to Washington in time to open a flower show.

Saturday she went with the President to Arlington to lay a wreath on the Unknown Soldier's tomb. The rest of the day she entertained New York State's Superintendent of Public Works & Mrs. Frederick Stuart Greene, who stayed over night after going to a play with their hostess.

Sunday was an unusually quiet day for Mrs. Roosevelt--friends for lunch and supper, then the night train for New York, where she attended an Iturbi concert.

Such a routine would soon put many an ordinary woman in a sanitarium. Mrs. Roosevelt is no ordinary woman. Her supply of vitality is apparently inexhaustible, corresponding with the tireless energy of her husband's mind since his affliction. Even Mrs. Roosevelt admits, however, that "the job of being a homekeeper, a wife and a mother plus some other job is quite a job."

"It's Up to the Women" It is only natural that anyone who circulates as fast as Eleanor Roosevelt and sounds off so often on so many subjects should not consistently display Minervan wit & wisdom. Fortnight ago she published a book, It's Up to the Women.* Her theme is characteristic: "We are going through a great crisis in this country. . . . The women have a big part to play if we are coming through successfully. . . . Many of us are afraid because we have lost pleasant things which we have always had, but the women who came over in the Mayflower did not have them, . . . No chain is stronger than its weakest link and it is well for the women . . . to realize that the time has come when drones are no longer tolerated."

In her 264 pages indefatigable Mrs. Roosevelt has spread her talent very thin. It is not half so rich and keen a book as her cousin Alice's, published simultaneously (TIME, Nov. 6). Nevertheless, the volume and catholicity of subjects Eleanor Roosevelt touches on--from preparing stuffed eggs to the NRA--proves her once more a lady of illimitable interests. Excerpts :

"For every normal human being, fresh air is essential."

"People who do not sleep should not worry about it. They should lie there and rest and think about pleasant things."

"Fear is a bad thing at all times and should be eliminated from our lives as much as possible."

"The modern grandmother cannot be the old-fashioned grandmother, but she can contribute much to the world of today."

"The civilization of Rome came to an end because individual citizens lost faith in each other. . . ."

"I cannot lay claim to more than the usual ordinary individual's education or culture but I have had opportunities for mixing with a great many people in a great many parts of the world and no one can do this without being forced to think out a certain philosophy of living."

* Stokes,$1.25.

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